Film, music and TV critic

In the first scene of the cracking new thriller Orphan Black (SBS 2, 8.30pm) Sarah Manning (Tatiana Maslany) has an out-of-body experience when she watches her exact double calmly step in front of a moving train. She then has an in-body experience, when she walks away with the deceased lookalike's bag, and thus her identity.

"It's you with a nicer haircut," says Sarah's confidant, fellow foster child Felix (Jordan Gavaris), looking at a photo of what could be Sarah's twin.

One of the winning qualities this Canadian series has is that it makes you think about who you are in ways both deeply personal and wildly entertaining.

By the end of these first two episodes Sarah, a leather-jacketed hustler on the run from an abusive boyfriend and looking to reclaim her young daughter, will have been shot at, forced to impersonate a police officer and witnessed her own wake. The show's look is anonymous, but it moves with quick assurance.

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A science-fiction storyline, and the fact that the terrific Maslany plays multiple roles, should prepare you for the plot's development. The notion that we're all unique individuals might not be true in Sarah's case, and it's fascinating watching her come to grips with the little she's made of her life when someone seemingly exactly the same ended up in far better circumstances (at least until the struck-by-a-train thing).

The last time sci-fi was big on television in the 1970s, it meant shaky cardboard sets, space opera villains and robots flummoxed by gravel. More recently the genre has taken up residence in contemporary stories, fixating on what defines us as human. As with Joss Whedon's Dollhouse, Orphan Black subverts the notion of identity.

It also has a sharp sense of humour: Sarah's reactions to the scrapes she finds herself in are blackly amusing, and while the camp Felix may be loyal, he's hardly your standard plucky sidekick. Apoplectic at being driven into the suburbs, he's not keen to keep watch for Sarah. "I don't do back-up!" he snaps.

The historic is somewhat more difficult to believe due to cheap production values in When Weather Changed History (7Two, 7.30pm). In the early days of the disastrous 1927 flooding of the Mississippi River in the US's south, "a 25-foot wall of water crash through the hole" in a levee, but on screen you see a handful of sandbags and knee-deep water. The re-creation appears to be a toddlers' pool.

This is a fascinating story where the archival footage is dragged down by laughable inserts. Yet 246 people died, 70,000 square kilometres were flooded and in the aftermath vulnerable poor African-Americans migrated to northern cities in vast numbers. Treat it like a radio documentary, or an attempt to catch Sarah Manning out: close your eyes and listen.